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So the notoriously alt-right fringe fake news organization, the BBC, had an article entitled Different Nationalities Really Have Different Personalities. It begins: When psychologists have given the same personality test to hundreds or thousands of people from different nations, they have indeed found that the average scores tend to come out differently across cultures. In other words, the average personality in one country often really is different from the...

Worse than expected and downward revisions as well. Seems related to what looks like a continuing credit collapse: Highlights First-quarter consumer spending is in trouble. Retail sales fell 0.2 percent in March which is under the Econoday consensus for no change. Importantly, February sales are revised sharply lower, to minus 0.3 percent vs an initial gain of 0.1 percent. Vehicle sales round out the quarter with a 3rd straight sharp decline at minus 1.2 percent. Sales at...

from Peter Radford It is easy to be partisan. It is easy to believe in sweeping utopian solutions. It is easy to delude yourself that what you think is what everyone thinks, or, perhaps, what they ought to think. This is why I recoil from anyone offering definitive answers to complex questions. The truth is never so easily teased from reality. A healthy does of skepticism helps to keep us grounded. It seems we need that protection especially right now. Why now? Because I feel we are going...

from Lars Syll One way that macroeconomics stands out from other fields in economics is in how often it produces forecasts. The vast majority of empirical models in economics can be very successful at identifying causal relations or at fitting explaining behavior, but they are never used to provide unconditional forecasts, nor do people expect them to. Macroeconomists, instead, are asked to routinely produce forecasts to guide fiscal and monetary policy, and are perhaps too eager to...

from David Ruccio Is it any surprise, as Christina Starman, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom argue, that fairness is not the same thing as equality? There is immense concern about economic inequality, both among the scholarly community and in the general public, and many insist that equality is an important social goal. However, when people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We suggest that these two phenomena can be...

In 2008, conventional economics led us blindfolded into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Almost a decade later, with the global economy wallowing in low growth that they can’t explain, mainstream economists are reluctantly coming to realise that their models are useless for understanding the real world. How did mainstream economists not see the crisis coming? Was it unpredictable, as they now assert, or did their theory blind them to the real causes? Will another...

from Jayati Ghosh Mr Trump’s policy stance will, however, mean that the United States – which has been providing less and less of a positive demand stimulus to the rest of the world economy ever since the Global Financial crisis – will continue to shrink its import demand and add to the forces that are making global trade decelerate and even decline. What does all this mean for developing countries? First, that those who are worried are right to be worried, but perhaps not for the reasons...

from Peter Radford One of the controversies buried by contemporary economists in their great cause of advocating market freedoms, is that of the role of central panning. There was a time when economics accomodated controversy. Nowadays it’s arguments are securely contained within the narrow bounds of saltwater versus freshwater type spats that are little more than professional name calling inspired over minor differences of detail. Recall the capital controversy? No? How about the...